It was over a year ago Juniper Networks and enterprise wireless LAN maker Trapeze Networks were linked together. But it was all talk. Fast forward to today - Telephony magazine reports that the company raised $30 million in Series D funding from Accel, Redpoint, Oak, and a bunch of previous investors. But the biggest surprise of this funding round was an investment from Juniper Networks. That brings the total funding to $102.5 million.
So the company has raised money from Nortel, Motorola Ventures (Series C) and now Juniper. It has partnerships with 3Com, D-Link and a bunch of others. Still, the deal could eventually spell bad news for Meru Networks, which had announced a deal with Juniper last year. Of course, this is not such good news for Aruba Networks as well. (See Aruba Dreams of IPO.)
Trapeze CEO Jim Vogt did a smackdown on Aruba in another news report.
“[Aruba is] coming directly to large enterprise accounts, and every time they show up in the lobby, they see three of my guys and Cisco. They’re getting squeezed.”
Not sure about that - Synergy Research’s second quarter 2006 data puts Aruba at #3 spot, with a 21% increase in market share from first quarter 2006. Cisco say a 4% decline during the same period.
4 comments so far
9:09 PM PT
…because Synergy doesn’t aggregate Nortel, 3Com and other Trapeze OEMS. If they did, Aruba may find that #3 hard to claim.
12:18 AM PT
john,
while that might be the case, i think aruba share is up 21%, which is nothing to sneeze at, even if we assume terrible first quarter 2006. the “squeezed” claim seems a bit stretched… don’t you think?
8:08 PM PT
some WLAN move from Juniper at last .. is it too late ? or better late than never ? …
11:51 PM PT
I wonder if Juniper’s investment in Trapeze is symbolic or something beyond that. Meru arguably has a clean technology base and thus may be easier to integrate. Most of Trapeze ‘wow’ is in their mgmt solution. If WLAN was a market that was causing huge strategic problems for Juniper, Meru would have provided a good enough solution. Even further back NetScreen had a strong partnership with Colubris that could have been tapped into.
However, if Juniper expands into switching, WLAN may become tablestakes for them; and at that point leveraging what Trapeze has done with their other OEMs could come handy.
For Trapeze per se, given the amount they have raised I’m not sure what kind of exit, if any at all, will they be able to muster.
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